America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

You know, I used to live in Russia where you had officers in the military opening up the warehouses at night and taking weapons out and putting them into a truck and selling them to foreign powers. That type of stuff doesn't happen in the United States. We still have a very functioning and relatively civil society.

If you look back in history, as the barbarians were invading the gates of Rome, people were consulting fortunetellers and worrying about the end of the world and all sorts of other apocalyptic notions. When the tsars were finally overthrown, they were all reading tarot cards even as the revolutionaries were banging at the gates.

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.